1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an improved data digital processing system and, in particular, to a method and apparatus for input/output processing. Still more particularly, the present invention provides a method and apparatus for peripheral monitoring.
2. Description of Related Art
One of the most critical and used devices of a digital data processing system is the disk drive. Unfortunately, multiple disk drives within a computer system are often used in an unbalanced manner throughout the lifetime of the disk drives. For example, an unbalanced condition occurs when one disk drive is chosen for a particular operation, such as an installation of an operating system, due to configuration information or its physical location within the computer system, thereby resulting in the disk drive being used for reading and writing operations much more often than other equally capable disk drives. Hence, there is a higher likelihood that this disk drive will fail sooner than other disk drives in the computer system. This situation might cause system downtime to occur more often as one drive, over time, becomes a fail point for the computer system.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to have a method and a system for equalizing usage of multiple disk drives within a computer system.